My Do-It-Yourself Air Conditioner lab incorporates a variety of scaffolds and gets students thinking about collision theory and how hot particles transfer energy to cold particles. Students construct their own air conditioners out of kitchen materials and test their efficacy. Building and designing projects like this make labs more meaningful and meet NGSS engineering and design criteria for thermal energy transfer standards.

My Do-It-Yourself Air Conditioner lab incorporates a variety of scaffolds and gets students thinking about collision theory and how hot particles transfer energy to cold particles. Students construct their own air conditioners out of kitchen materials and test their efficacy. Building and designing projects like this make labs more meaningful and meet NGSS engineering and design criteria for thermal energy transfer standards.

Self-Paced Lab Documentation

Organizing labs that span over a number of classes requires a substantial amount of pre-planning. The benefits of proper Lab Documentation are potentially enormous for students. Lab Documentation ensures that I can follow students through every step of the lab process even when groups are completing different segments within varying timeframes. Students develop lab procedures on Google Docs, create charts/tables/graphs on Google Sheets, and compile lab portfolios on wikispaces. By hosting their work on Google Apps for Education, my students can easily collaborate with group mates and me on a lab activity over the course of a week or more. During this time, I can ask probing questions, offer insight on effective lab methods and tactics, work directly on their documents, and help students record their labs with media-capture tools. Being able to analyze video of the lab procedure next to the results it produced provides my students a great means to produce high-quality lab reports, which they can publish to the web and their group wikispace pages.

Students work on each piece of their lab in Google Docs, and then insert the final product into their wikispaces portfolio. These portfolios hold the complete body of work that students produce, and are shared with anyone that the student feels comfortable showing. Having a publically visible product promotes individual and group accountability, while at the same time gives students a tangible entity to be proud of and celebrate. This year's Frying Nemo group compiled the entirety of their Flamin' Hot Cheetos project into a Google Doc and inserted different pieces into the corresponding wikispaces pages.

The end of the year science fair pulls everything together for one cohesive project that paints a clearer picture as to how far my students have come in their ability to design and implement lab experiments. I provide them with guidelines for each piece of their lab development to highlight what protocol must be followed and remind them what parts are crucial in the process.

My Do-It-Yourself Air Conditioner lab incorporates a variety of scaffolds and gets students thinking about collision theory and how hot particles transfer energy to cold particles. Students construct their own air conditioners out of kitchen materials and test their efficacy. Building and designing projects like this make labs more meaningful and meet NGSS engineering and design criteria for thermal energy transfer standards.

The end of the year science fair pulls everything together for one cohesive project that paints a clearer picture as to how far my students have come in their ability to design and implement lab experiments. I provide them with guidelines for each piece of their lab development to highlight what protocol must be followed and remind them what parts are crucial in the process.

My Do-It-Yourself Air Conditioner lab incorporates a variety of scaffolds and gets students thinking about collision theory and how hot particles transfer energy to cold particles. Students construct their own air conditioners out of kitchen materials and test their efficacy. Building and designing projects like this make labs more meaningful and meet NGSS engineering and design criteria for thermal energy transfer standards.

Students work on each piece of their lab in Google Docs, and then insert the final product into their wikispaces portfolio. These portfolios hold the complete body of work that students produce, and are shared with anyone that the student feels comfortable showing. Having a publically visible product promotes individual and group accountability, while at the same time gives students a tangible entity to be proud of and celebrate. This year's Frying Nemo group compiled the entirety of their Flamin' Hot Cheetos project into a Google Doc and inserted different pieces into the corresponding wikispaces pages.

About this strategy

Similar Strategies

In the traditional classroom, time is constant and understanding is variable from student to student. The Flipped Mastery model inverts the traditional relationship between time and understanding, letting understanding be the constant and time be variable. All of my students are held to the same high standards, but they master standards at a pace they feel comfortable with and are ready for. Initially, many of my students are confused about what a self-paced mastery-based class is all about, so my co-teacher and I find it helpful to introduce the concept to our students in a very strategic and explicit way at the beginning of each school year.

I was spending an hour every day filing students' graded quizzes when we realized, "Why are we doing all this filing? Students could easily do this themselves." Since the number one thing we are trying to get students to do is take ownership over their learning, we decided to have students file their own papers, cutting down on a lot of menial work for us and giving students a chance to see a physical record of what they had and had not mastered.

My blended classroom is based on the Flipped Mastery model (please see the "Introduction to Mastery Based Learning" strategy video). When my students think that they have mastered the skills and concepts in a particular lesson, they show their completed notes to me or my co-teacher and get a Mastery Quiz. Students then head to the Mastery Zone, which is a section of the classroom reserved for students taking Mastery Quizzes and Level Tests. There is no talking in the Mastery Zone and the only technology permitted is a calculator. If they achieve at an 80% or higher rate, students move forward in the curriculum. If not, they review the concepts and materials in the lesson and re-take the Mastery Quiz in the Mastery Zone when they are ready. The Mastery Zone assessment strategy is a concept I adapted from the Algebros Flipped Mastery program.